Yahtzee With Buddies!
2017-2020
Client: Mediatonic
Mediatonic brought in Infinite Continues to assist with a revamp of the UI of the Scopely-published ‘Yahtzee With Buddies!’ for an initial 3-6 month contract. Over time, this ended up being a 3-year collaboration with Medaitonic, with Infinite Continues effectively leading the UI process throughout.
We shaped the look and feel of the front-end, created a UI Bible, master templates, started and maintained the Adobe Library for the project, and spearheaded the UI design of nearly every major feature introduced to the base game.
Core Screens
Key to navigating Yahtzee With Buddies! is a cohesive look and feel throughout the core screens of the game. Text is bouncy and sharp, colours bright and saturated. Panel architecture and buttons were rendered to give a sense of physical ‘heft’ to them.
“I’ve worked with Ash at multiple studios on multiple projects. Easy to work with, reliable, and he’s a top bloke. Creativity, attention to detail, and efficient, he has it all and will be the first person I look to in the future for any UI needs.”
Salvatore Fileccia, Vice President of Studios, Tonic Games Group
Yahtzee Stars
One of the core tenets of the Yahtzee With Buddies! game was the consistent addition of brand new game modes. This was Yahtzee Stars, which began life as Yahtzee Slots, and then Yahtzee Jackpot; complete with one-armed bandit lever, and the cherry Dice Master as a key motif. It was felt that this had too many undesired connotations with gambling, so it soon became the more family-friendly Yahtzee Stars.
Also shown are the logo variants for the ‘Dice’ version; Scopely manage two near-identical games called Yahtzee With Buddies! and Dice With Buddies! All UI work had to be created with both games (and associated colour palettes and logos) in mind.
Yahtzee Survivor
Survivor was intended as a real-time, knockout-style game mode that showed contestants being knocked out after each round, with the overall winner bagging the best rewards. With a gameshow Dice Master directing proceedings, we created a pseudo-gameshow studio, whilst still retaining the core UI principles established across the rest of the game.
Shown are a selection of screens throughout the entire flow of the game mode.
Collection
To increase long-term engagement and add the excitement of a meta-game, a new set of screens was introduced to the main bottom nav bar in the form of ‘Collection’. The brief here was to introduce a chunky sticker set motif, complete with different sticker rarities and unique rewards.
Shown here are a collection of the screens produced for this feature.
Family Games Night
Family Games Night was a feature that introduced a number of micro-game style elements to the core Yahtzee experience, designed to bring a clutch of different game modes under one meta-game progression with persistent scores, ranks and leaderboard.
This was a feature that went through a number of revisions, as the art team grappled with how skeuomorphic to render the lobby screen. IC’s favourite direction, with the game modes presented proudly as board games on a shelf, was ultimately replaced with something more utilitarian, but better suited to the rest of the Yahtzee visual aesthetic.
A number of routes are presented below.
Dice World
An early task for IC after we were brought on board on Yahtzee was to revamp the ‘Showdown’ game mode into ‘Dice World’, putting the characterful Dice Master characters front and centre in an epic PvE head-to-head mode. Our brief was to build layout around hero images of the Dice Masters themselves.
Below are a number of screens from throughout the entire process.
Interstitials
A collection of promotional advertisements used as interstitials in the game itself in order to promote different SKUs of the app, additional game modes and bonuses. A nice change of pace from UI layout work and a chance to flex some creative muscles!
Additional Game Modes
There were a huge amount of game modes we were involved in helping bring to life within the Yahtzee With Buddies universe. Here are a few of our favourites…
